By Joshua Frank 18 January, 2006
Countercurrents.org

So I guess we know what the buzz is going to be for the next, ah,
year or so. It looks like Barack Obama, the rookie Senator from Illinois,
is going to run for president. He has received a plethora of accolades
from key primary states in recent weeks...

Iraqi Oil

By Chris Floyd, Information Clearing House
Posted on January 12, 2007, Printed on January 12, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/46602/

I. The Twin Engines of Bush's War The reason that George W. Bush
insists that "victory" is achievable in Iraq is not because he is deluded
or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No,
it's that his definition of "victory" is different from those bruited
about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the
chattering classes in print and on-line. For Bush, victory is indeed
at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved
by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned
"surge" of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory
that are now ripening in his hand. At any time within the next few days,
the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon
law" essentially drawn up by the Bush Administration and its U.K. lackey,
the
Independent on Sunday reports.

By Bob Geiger Created Jan 10 2007 - 10:20am

In a media conference call Tuesday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
(D-CA) reinforced the tough stance that she and Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid (D-NV) are taking against the Bush-McCain doctrine of escalating
the Iraq war, denouncing Bush's historic "poor judgment" and warning
that Democrats will not allow their loyalty to the troops to be questioned
because of their stance.

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet
Posted on January 10, 2007, Printed on January 10, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/46492/

The balloons were still being inflated for the Democrats' inaugural
bashes on the Hill last week when the bloody specter of Iraq appeared
in the form of Cindy Sheehan. The direct-action peace mom showed up
in the Cannon House Office Building last Wednesday with a handful of
fellow activists, pamphlets, and no intention of letting the first news
conference convened by House Democrats begin and end with yet another
thumbs-up "100 Hours" boilerplate. As Rahm Emanuel finished talking
up a bill to reduce student loan rates, Sheehan and her supporters made
their trademark demands: "De-escalate! Investigate! Troops home now!"

By Robert Scheer, Truthdig
Posted on January 10, 2007, Printed on January 10, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/46556/

To surge or not to surge, that is the question. As our prince proposes,
once again, to take arms against a sea of troubles, he responds not
to the disaster that he has visited upon Iraq, but rather embraces a
desperate strategy for salvaging what remains of his reign.

By Robert Parry
January 8, 2007

George W. Bush has purged senior military and intelligence officials
who were obstacles to a wider war in the Middle East, broadening his
options for both escalating the conflict inside Iraq and expanding the
fighting to Iran and Syria with Israel’s help.

By Robert Scheer, AlterNet
Posted on January 3, 2007, Printed on January 7, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/46234/

Someone has to say it: The hanging of Saddam Hussein was an act of
barbarism that makes a mockery of President Bush's claim it was "an
important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy." Instead,
the rushed, illegal and unruly execution of a former U.S. ally after
his conviction in a kangaroo court blurred the line between terrorist
and terrorized as effectively as Saddam's own evil propaganda ever did.

By Michael Munk, AlterNet
Posted on January 4, 2007, Printed on January 4, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/46161/

To bring the human cost to Americans of the invasion and occupation
of Iraq home, antiwar groups across the country are marking mark the
3,000th death of a member of its military components (at this writing
the total is 3,004). But by focusing only on the number of dead Americans
we are being manipulated along with the media and public by the administration's
determination to minimize the cost in blood of establishing permanent
military bases in the heart of the Middle East oil patch.

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on October 16, 2006, Printed on December 30, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/43045/

Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series.
Go here to read
the second installment. Iraq is sitting on a mother lode
of some of the lightest, sweetest, most profitable crude oil on earth,
and the rules that will determine who will control it and on what terms
are about to be set. The Iraqi government faces a December deadline,
imposed by the world's wealthiest countries, to complete its final oil
law. Industry analysts expect that the result will be a radical departure
from the laws governing the country's oil-rich neighbors, giving foreign
multinationals a much higher rate of return than with other major oil
producers and locking in their control over what George Bush called
Iraq's "patrimony" for decades, regardless of what kind of policies
future elected governmentsmight want to pursue.

By Robert Scheer, Truthdig
Posted on December 21, 2006, Printed on December 21, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/45764/

By Robert Parry
December 19, 2006

In early December, when Senate Democrats politely questioned Robert
M. Gates and then voted unanimously to confirm him as Defense Secretary,
they bought into the conventional wisdom that Gates was a closet dove
who would help guide the United States out of George W. Bush's mess
in Iraq.

Howard Zinn gave a speech to the University of Wisconsin (my alma
mater,thank you) explaining the ultimately simple mechanism behind our
repeated mistake of fighting wars both disastrous to our nation and
to others. Bad History. Watch a clip, right.

By Marc Cooper, TheNation.com
Posted on December 18, 2006, Printed on December 18, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/45646/

For the first time since Vietnam, an organized, robust movement of
active-duty US military personnel has publicly surfaced to oppose a
war in which they are serving. Those involved plan to petition Congress
to withdraw American troops from Iraq.

Iraq Study Group Recommends Privatization

By Antonia Juhasz, AlterNet
Posted on December 7, 2006, Printed on December 11, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/45190/

In its heavily anticipated report released on Wednesday, the Iraq
Study Group made at least four truly radical proposals. The report calls
for the United States to assist in privatizing Iraq's national oil industry,
opening Iraq to private foreign oil and energy companies, providing
direct technical assistance for the "drafting" of a new national oil
law for Iraq...

By John Tirman, AlterNet
Posted on November 28, 2006, Printed on November 29, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/44771/

The escalating violence in Iraq's civil war is
now earning considerable attention as we pass
yet another milestone -- U.S. occupation there,
in two weeks, will exceed the length of the
Second World War for America. While the news media
have finally started to grapple with
the colossal amount of killing, a number of misunderstandings
persist. Some are willful deceptions.
Let's look at a few of them:

The corporate-controlled American media is deliberately suppressing
the results of a survey that demonstrates that the US invasion and occupation
of Iraq has caused more than 600,000 deaths in the past three years—a figure that in
and of itself refutes all the claims by the Bush administration that it carried out the invasion
of Iraq in order to foster democracy in the Middle East. What kind of "freedom" and "human
rights" can be the consequence of such a slaughter?

The major American media organizations—including the New York Times—published
only brief reports on the study October 11. Taking their cue
from President Bush, who declared the survey’s methodology faulty without offering any
proof, the Times and other leading media outlets have dropped the subject. There have
been no editorials in the Times, the Washington Post, or other major newspapers, nor
any demands for a more serious response from the Bush administration.

By Gabriele Zamparini
On 20 September 2001

US President Bush addressing the Congress stated:
“The United
States respects the people of Afghanistan -- after all, we are currently
its largest source of humanitarian aid…”. On 7 October 2001
addressing the country Bush said:
“At the same time, the
oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America
and our allies. As we strike military targets, we'll also drop food,
medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering men and women
and children of Afghanistan. The United States of America is a friend
to the Afghan people…”.

Five years later the results of this respectful and generous friendship
have been published by the
Senlis Council, an international
policy think tank with offices in

A chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg has said George
W. Bush should be tried for war crimes along with Saddam Hussein.
Benjamin Ferenccz, who secured convictions for 22 Nazi officers
for their work in orchestrating the death squads that killed more
than 1 million people, told OneWorld both Bush and Saddam should
be tried for starting "aggressive" wars--Saddam for his 1990 attack
on Kuwait and Bush for his 2003 invasion of Iraq.

By Scott Ritter, AlterNet

Posted on June 26, 2006, Printed on June 26, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/38011/ It is hard sometimes to know what is real and what is fiction
when it comes to the news out of Iraq. America is in its "silly season," the summer months
leading up to a national election, and the media is going full speed ahead in exploiting
its primacy in the news arena by substituting responsible reporting with headline-grabbing
entertainment. So, as America closes in on the end of June and the celebration
of the 230th year of our nation's birth, I thought I would pen a short primer on three myths on
Iraq to keep an eye out for as we

"debate" the various issues pertaining to our third year of war
in that country.

The myth of sovereignty Imagine the president of the United States
flying to Russia, China,

England, France or just about any other nation on the planet,
landing at an airport on supposedly

sovereign territory, being driven under heavy U.S. military protection
to the U.S. Embassy, and

then with some five minutes notification, summoning the highest
elected official of that nation to

the U.S. Embassy for a meeting. It would never happen, unless
of course the nation in question is

Iraq, where Iraqi sovereignty continues to be hyped as a reality
when in fact it is as fictitious as any

fairy tale ever penned by the Brothers Grimm. For all of the
talk of a free Iraq, the fact is Iraq remains

very much an occupied nation where the United States (and its
ever decreasing "coalition of the willing")

On the third anniversary of the tanks
rolling over Iraq's border,most of the 59 million Homer Simpsons
who voted for Bush arebeginning to doubt if his mission
was accomplished.

But don't kid yourself -- Bush
and his co-conspirator, Dick Cheney,accomplished exactly what they
set out to do. In case you'veforgotten what their real mission
was, let me remind you of WhiteHouse spokesman Ari Fleisher's
original announcement, three yearsago, launching of what he called,

Mon Mar 20, 2:43 PM ET With no fanfare, President Bush signed a bill Monday pushing
the ceiling on the national debt to nearly $9 trillion.

Buzzflash.com

Why bother spending billions of dollars on big corporate mainstream
media reporters when they could just as easily have the Pentagon supply the stories
and footage directly? They already do in most cases. Take the breathlessly "covered" air attack in Iraq. "Largest
Air Attack in Iraq War Launched Against Insurgents," read one big city headline we saw.
And television was right there, providing lead stories on the massive "air attack." Only, of course, it turned out to be a PR stunt to boost Bush's
poll ratings at home and divert attention from the civil war in Iraq, as if the U.S. presence
was accomplishing something.

By Peter Dyer
March 16, 2006

Editor's Note: As the United States approaches the third anniversary
of the Iraq invasion, much of the commentary is focusing on the Bush administration's
"incompetence" in prosecuting the war -- the failure to commit enough
troops, the decision to disband the old Iraqi army without adequate plans
for training a new one, the highhandedness of the U.S. occupation.

But what about the legal and moral questions arising from the unprovoked
invasion of Iraq? Should George W. Bush and his top aides be held accountable
for violating the laws against aggressive war that the United States and other
Western nations promulgated in punishing senior Nazis after World War II? Do the
Nuremberg precedents that prohibit one nation from invading another apply
to Bush and American officials -- or are they somehow immune? Put bluntly, should Bush
and his inner circle face a war-crimes tribunal for the tens of thousands of deaths in
Iraq?

Despite the present-day conventional wisdom in Washington that these
are frivolous questions, they actually go to the heart of the American commitment
to the rule of law and the concept that the law applies to everyone. In this guest
essay, Peter Dyer looks at this larger issue:

WASHINGTON -- The former CIA official
charged withmanaging the U.S. government's secret
intelligenceassessments on Iraq says the Bush
administration chosewar first and then misleadingly
used raw data toassemble a public case for its
decision to invade.
_____________________________________________________________

James Risen's State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and
the Bush Administration, may hold bigger secrets than the disclosure
that President George W. Bush authorized warrantless eavesdropping
on Americans. Risen's book also confirms the most damning element
of the British Cabinet Office memos popularly called the "Downing
Street memos;" namely, that "the intelligence and the facts were
being fixed around the policy." The result is that it is no longer
credible to maintain that the failures in the Iraqi intelligence
were the product of a broken intelligence community. The Bush administration
deliberately fabricated the case against Iraq, lying to Congress
and the American people along the way.

By Robert Parry November 8, 2005

When Colin Powell’s former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson
publicly decried the Bush administration’s bungling of U.S. foreign
policy, the focus of the press coverage was on Wilkerson’s depiction
of a “cabal” headed by Vice President Dick Cheney that had hijacked
the decision-making process. Largely overlooked were Wilkerson’s
frank admissions about the importance of oil in justifying a long-term
U.S. military intervention in Iraq. “The other thing that no one
ever likes to talk about is SUVs and oil and consumption,” the retired
Army colonel said in a speech on Oct. 19. While bemoaning the administration’s
incompetence in implementing the war strategy, Wilkerson said the
U.S. government now had no choice but to succeed in Iraq or face
the necessity of conquering the Middle East within the next 10 years
to ensure access to the region’s oil supplies.

By MICHAEL MOSS

A secret Pentagon study has found that at least 80 percent of
the marines who have been killed in
Iraq from wounds to their upper body could have survived if
they had extra body armor. That armor has been available since 2003
but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it
to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection,
according to military officials.

Good soldiers follow orders and hundreds of American
military men and women returned to the United States
on holiday leave this month with orders to sell the
Iraq war to a skeptical public.

The program, coordinated through a Pentagon operation
dubbed “Operation Homefront,” ordered military
personnel to give interviews to their hometown
newspapers, television stations and other media
outlets and praise the American war effort in Iraq.

In brief, we have found that there is substantial evidence
the President,
the Vice President and other high ranking members of
the Bush Administration
misled Congress and the American people regarding the
decision to go to war
with Iraq; misstated and manipulated intelligence information
regarding the
justification for such war; countenanced torture and
cruel, inhuman and
degrading treatment and other legal violations in Iraq;
and permitted inappropriate
retaliation against critics of their Administration.
There is at least a prima facie case that these actions
by the President,
Vice-President and other members of the Bush Administration
violate a number
of federal laws, including (1) Committing
a Fraud against the United States; (2) Making

False Statements to Congress; (3) The War Powers Resolution;
(4) Misuse of Government

Funds; (5) federal laws and international treaties prohibiting
torture and cruel, inhuman, and

In the past week President Bush has twice attacked Democrats
for
being hypocrites on the Iraq war. "[M]ore than 100 Democrats in
the
House and Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted
to
support removing Saddam Hussein from power," he said.

The president's attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100
Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most
of
them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the
legitimate belief that the president and his administration were
truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering
menace -- that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would
become a mushroom cloud.

British Memo Reopens War Claim By Stephen J. Hedges and Mark Silva
The Chicago Tribune
Tuesday 17 May 2005
Leaked briefing says US intelligence facts `fixed' around policy.
Washington - A British official's report that the Bush
administration appeared intent on invading Iraq long before it
acknowledged as much or sought Congress' approval--and that
it "fixed" intelligence to fit its intention--has caused a stir
in
Britain.
But the potentially explosive revelation has proven to be
something of a dud in the United States . The White House has denied
the premise of the memo, the American media have reacted slowly
to
it and the public generally seems indifferent to the issue or
unwilling to rehash the bitter prewar debate over the reasons for
the war.Galloway
tongue-lashes Coleman; committee documents

show Bush political friends and family
paid Oil-for-Food

kickbacks to Saddam Hussein

By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Posted may 27, 2005

May 21, 2005—British Member of Parliament
George Galloway presented

the U.S. Senate with the best tongue
lashing since U.S. Army counsel

Joseph Welch excoriated Senator Joseph
McCarthy over his witch hunt

directed at one of Welch's law firm
associates who had been a member

of the Lawyer's Guild: "You've done
enough. Have you no sense of decency,

The most important news from Iraq last week was not the much ballyhooed
constitutional pact by Shias and Kurds, nor the tragic stampede
deaths of
nearly 1,000 pilgrims in Baghdad .

The U.S. Air Force's senior officer, Gen. John Jumper, stated U.S.
warplanes
would remain in Iraq to fight resistance forces and protect the
American-installed regime "more or less indefinitely." Jumper's
bombshell
went largely unnoticed due to Hurricane Katrina. Nearly 9,000
U.S. troops dead? A NATIONWIDE CALL

FOR INFO FROM SURVIVORS.

Has the Bush administration
drastically understated the U.S. military death
count by redefining
"death"? The following article suggests that it has, and
it calls for a nationwide
campaign to honor deceased service members by
naming and counting
them.

According to the article: "...DoD lists currently being very
quietly circulated indicate almost 9,000 [ U.S. military]
dead"; this far exceeds the "official" death count of 1,831. How
can this be? It's largely because "U.S. Military

Personnel who died in German hospitals or en route to German
hospitals have not previously been counted." In other words, "death"
has been redefined.

Jeremy Scahill Wed Jun 1, 6:29 PM ET Posted June 4,
2005

It was a huge air assault: Approximately 100 US and British planes
flew from Kuwait into Iraqi airspace. At least seven types
of aircraft were part of this massive operation, including US F-15
Strike Eagles and Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack planes.
They dropped precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein's major
western air-defense facility, clearing the path for Special Forces
helicopters that lay in wait in Jordan . Earlier attacks had been
carried out against Iraqi command and control centers, radar detection
systems, Revolutionary Guard units, communication centers and mobile
air-defense systems. The Pentagon's goal was clear: Destroy Iraq's
ability to resist. This was war. But there was a catch: The war
hadn't started yet, at least not officially. This was September
2002--a month before Congress had voted to give President Bush the
authority he used to invade Iraq , two months before the United
Nations brought the matter to a vote and more than six months before
"shock and awe" officially began. At the time, the Bush Administration
publicly played down the extent of the air strikes, claiming the
United States was just defending the so-called no-fly zones. But
new information that has come out in response to the Downing Street
memo reveals that, by this time, the war was already a foregone
conclusion and attacks were no less than the undeclared beginning
of the invasion of Iraq.

By Robert Shetterly
Bangor Daily News Posted June 5, 2005

Let's consider an item from the news of about two weeks ago:
A British citizen leaked a memo to London's Sunday Times. The memo
was of the written account of a meeting that a man named Richard
Dearlove had with the Bush administration in July 2002. Dearlove
was the head of the England's MI-6, the equivalent of the CIA. On
July 23, 2002, Dearlove briefed Tony Blair about the meeting. He
said that Bush was determined to attack Iraq. He said that Bush
knew that US intelligence had no evidence of weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq and no links to foreign terrorists, that there was no imminent
danger to the US from Iraq. But, since Bush was determined to go
to war, "Intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy."
"Fixed" means faked, manufactured, conjured, hyped - the product
of whole cloth fabrication. So we got aluminum tubes, mushroom clouds
imported from Niger, biological weapons labs in weather trucks,
fear and trembling, the phony ultimatums to Saddam Hussein to turn
over the weapons he didn't have and thus couldn't. We got the call
to arms, the stifling of dissent, the parade of retired generals
strategizing on the "news" shows, with us or against us, flags in
the lapel, a craven media afraid to look for a truth that might
disturb their corporate owners who would profit from the war. Shock
and Awe. Fallujah. Abu Ghraib. It was all a lie. Many of us have
said for a long time it was a lie. But here it is in black and white:
Lies from a president who has taken a sacred trust to uphold the
Constitution of the United States. So, what does it mean? It means
that our president and all of his administration are war criminals.
It's as simple as that. They lied to the American people, have killed
and injured and traumatized thousands of American men and women
doing their patriotic duty, killed at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians,
destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and poisoned its environment, squandered
billions and billions of our tax dollars, made a mockery of American
integrity in the world, changed the course of history, tortured
Iraqi prisoners, and bound us intractably to an insane situation
that they have no idea how to fix because they had no plan, but
greed and empire, in the first place.

The scandal axiom in Washington states that it is not the crime
that destroys you, but the cover-up. Today in Washington you can
hear terms like 'Iraqgate' and 'Weaponsgate' bandied about, but
such obtuse labels do not provide an explanation for the profound
movements that are taking place. Clearly, there is a scandal brewing
over the Iraq war and the Bush administration claims of Iraqi weapons
arsenals that led to the shooting. Clearly, there is a cover-up
taking place. Yet this instance, the crimes that have led to the
cover-up are worse by orders of magnitude than the cover-up itself.
The simple fact is that America went to war in Iraq because George
W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice
and virtually every other public face within this administration
vowed that Iraq had vast stockpiles of chemical, biological and
nuclear weapons. America went to war because these people vowed
that Iraq had direct connections to al Qaeda, and by inference to
the attacks of September 11.